Warlock Holmes--A Study in Brimstone (13 page)

A MAN COULD NOT HAVE SURVIVED, BUT JEFFERSON
Hope was no longer a man. Love died. Reason died. All the better graces of humankind dried up and perished in him. Though hunger dogged him and thirst was his constant companion, he took no joy in food or water. Hate sustained him. He staggered about the desert, by day and by night, howling for vengeance with Lucy’s empty wrapper clutched in his fist. The beast was all that remained in him. The reaver. Wendigo, the Indians called it.

Yet he who lives for revenge must find his prey. Madness is blinding; one may not steer by it. Only reason can make a clear path. Thus—not because it was welcome, but because it was needed—thought began to return to him. Jefferson Hope could not say how long he had wandered those wastes, living on scorpion meat and his own tears. It must have been months, maybe years, yet he knew he must leave the cradle of his madness. His destiny lay in the goldfields of California, though that metal did not shine for him now.

The mountains could not stop him. He crossed to California. There he encountered his first test. Drebber and Strangerson, no fools, had elected to change their names. Nobody knew them here and they abandoned their tarnished identities in favor of a fresh start. Hope had no easy time garnering information. His grief had transformed him totally; he had lost command of the language of man, forgotten the taste of donut.

Had Drebber and Strangerson hidden in the wild, Hope could have tracked them like a wolf, but men hide amongst men, not trees. Even as the local prospectors and tribes began to whisper of the wild man, Hope began—word by agonizing word—to teach himself to speak again. He never did get it quite right, in those days. Though he always tried to pass himself off as a fellow human, when he did get a tidbit of information, it was never civility that afforded it to him, but fear.

That first winter after his return to the world of men, he had a breakthrough. He came across a trio of dejected prospectors, on the brink of abandoning their claim. They’d purchased it some months before from a duo from back east. One of the pair had been a geologist, they said, who had been in the territory not two weeks before discovering the vein that made his fortune. He and his partner had worked the claim for some months until, flush with money and tired of their labors, they resolved to head to one of the major cities and set themselves up as outfitters, to profit from the sweat of other hopefuls. These new owners were hot with rage, for having purchased the profitable claim with the last of their monies, they found it had been quite played out. They had no stomach for revenge themselves, but happily told Jefferson Hope that the pair had headed up to ’Frisco in early autumn, under the names Jenoch Strebber and Oseph Dangerson.

It was a hard and heavy winter that year; many an old squaw, huddled in her tepee, found it to be her last. Yet Jefferson Hope had no care of cold. He did not stop to rest. He no longer slept, except for when exhaustion took its hold and he fell where he stood. Foot by foot, step by step, he made his way north. The earth rejoiced at spring as Jefferson Hope reached his destination, but the man himself took no more comfort from the season of rebirth than he had in the season of death.

It was in San Francisco that Hope made his first attempts on the lives of his quarry. At first he had trouble nearing them, since they were respectable businessmen with the trappings of money and he was a ravening wild man in three-year-old rags. Only in the rough-hewn docks district was he accepted, so that was where he lodged. He took on work as a dockhand, slowly gaining money for a haircut and respectable clothes. He met his first true friend since the Lucy disaster (and as it turned out, the last one he ever had). It was the self-proclaimed ruler of the United States, Emperor Norton I. Norton allowed Hope to lodge with him for a time, and taught him the streets and customs of San Francisco.

Once able to blend with the general population, Hope began to hunt again. Drebber and Strangerson were easy to locate—they had opened their own outfitter’s shop—but difficult to slay. Jefferson Hope’s first attempts were artful, but met with no success. A load of lumber, being hoisted to build a new roof, fell and nearly crushed Strangerson, who leapt away at the last moment. Examination of the main hoist rope revealed that it had been cut (how alarmed Strangerson would have been to know it was his own pearl-handled knife that did the deed). Drebber found a bootlace woven in amongst his linguine one day and lucky for him that he had—it was rumored that bootlaces were indigestible and caused sickness or death in anybody unfortunate enough to ingest one.

In early June 1873, Drebber was very nearly the victim of a strange incident in which a gorilla appeared at the highest point of Lombard Street and began rolling barrels down at the unfortunate people below. Drebber only managed to preserve himself by leaping over the barrels as they rolled towards him. Two days later, the Union Square Theater reported one of their ape costumes missing and Enoch Drebber began to doubt the random nature of these occurrences.

The final proof came on August 2, when Hope—frustrated at his failed attempts—decided to simply shoot Strangerson down in the street. He bought a derringer from a dockside pawnshop and intercepted Joseph as he walked to work. Hope called Strangerson by name; he wanted his foe to know who it was that killed him and why he must die. Strangerson later recalled the moment when those terrible, angry eyes resolved into a once-familiar face and Jefferson Hope entered his life once more (though he had never disappeared from Strangerson’s guilt-induced night terrors). Hope raised his pistol to fire, but at that very moment, Strangerson was rescued by what appeared to be a small outdoor dining area, packed with grinning patrons, which sped up the hill behind him. Strangerson leapt onto this passing monstrosity and made good his escape on what turned out to be the city’s first cable car—the Clay Street Hill Railroad—on its maiden voyage. Hope fired, but the derringer, like most of its make, carried only two shots and was inaccurate at a range of more than three feet.

Once again, Drebber and Strangerson fled in the night. Leaving their inferiors to sell their shop and settle affairs, they abandoned their homes at about three that next morning to board the first steamer to Seattle. It didn’t take Hope long to figure out where they had gone and he followed, hot on their heels. By the time he reached that northern town, he was once again short of funds and was compelled to take work as a timber-feller in the hills above the city. Drebber and Strangerson now went armed and took care with their persons, never walking alone, always sitting with their backs to the wall and their eyes on the door in every public establishment they entered. Still, Hope’s attempts grew ever more bold until they were forced to flee Seattle as well.

So began the merry chase that stretched on for another eight years. From Seattle they fled to Cleveland, from there to Detroit, thence to Pittsburgh, Austin and finally New York. If only they had thought to settle in St. Louis, they would have been safe, for Jefferson Hope would have died of grief if ever he had happened past Hall and Sons’ Bakery. In each city where they landed, Hope pursued menial labor while Drebber and Strangerson sought to expand their trade in the little time they had before their pursuing phantom materialized again and forced their departure.

Finally, they left the United States, thinking Hope would lack both the funds and the heart to follow them to unfamiliar lands. They first tried their luck in St. Petersburg, after hearing that the burgeoning Russian empire wished to modernize and open trade with the West. Unfortunately for the two pastry thieves, they spoke no Russian and ran headlong into that country’s entrenched conservative values. Outsiders were not welcome. They were there less than a year, struggling to begin a successful trading company, before Hope found them. They could hardly have been more conspicuous. Strangerson, especially, was glad to shake the dust of the place from his boots and flee to Copenhagen.

From Copenhagen to Paris. From Paris to Barcelona. From Barcelona to Berlin. Here predator and prey parted ways. Drebber and Strangerson fled to Rome. Hope to London. Years of study had taught him well the habits of his quarry—Hope realized Drebber and Strangerson had a predilection for capitals. He also knew they were nearing the end of their patience with the language barrier. London, then. When the pair fled Berlin, Hope ignored their destination. Instead, he installed himself in London and found work as a cabbie. They would come, he knew. They would land here and when they did, this time he would already be on his feet, with a job, the funds to pursue them and knowledge of the terrain. London’s streets are a study in madness, or perhaps randomness, or perhaps the threshold between the two. Nevertheless, with diligence, Jefferson Hope learned the streets well enough. His job took him often to the docks, to train stations, to hotels, and in each of these he asked after his prey. When they came, he would know.

THE DRIVE TO SCOTLAND YARD WAS A LONG ONE AT THE
best of times. In the middle of the afternoon, through streets bustling with traffic, trade and about six thousand “flower girls” showing off their “wares” it took even longer. Thus, Jefferson Hope finished his tale ere we arrived.

“As soon as I found they had landed in London, I began to shadow them,” he told us. “I started spending most days and nights near Charpontier’s boarding house. But they took care, as they always did, not to travel alone. That last fateful night, I followed their cab to Euston Station and watched ’em make for the trains. I don’t mind telling you, I was desperate. I couldn’t have them escape me again, for the pressure in my head and heart had grown so intense that I thought I might explode early.”

At this point, I was forced to intrude myself upon the story and ask, “Now, precisely why are you convinced that you are going to explode?”

“Russian Gypsy wise woman,” he remarked, as if it were a perfectly common avenue of medical advice. “Even before St. Petersburg, I felt the pressure growing. I knew I had to catch ’em. She’s the one who told me I was likely to bleed profusely at exciting moments in my life story, due to my unnaturally high blood pressure. She seemed real sorry when she told me I’d explode after everything was all resolved, but I didn’t mind much. I just want to have justice and be done with it. I don’t reckon a man ought to outlive his own story on any count, do you, Doctor?”

Preposterous as it all sounded, you should have heard his chest. He gave me permission to examine him and I was astounded by what I found. His skin was hot and throbbed with an unaccountably powerful and uneven pulse. Though my medical training encompassed no such possibility, I found myself shying to the opposite end of the cab, lest his heart and brain burst in my lap.

“Anyways, they missed the train,” Hope continued, “and they argued. Leaving my horse, I snuck through the crowd, close enough to hear ’em. Strangerson wanted to go on to another private hotel he knew—Halliday’s—I guess they wasn’t welcome back where they come from. Still, Drebber said he had business back at Charpontier’s. Drebber weren’t too nice to his friend that day, being already rotten with drink. He treated everyone pretty bad, I guess. Strangerson took one cab, Drebber another. I followed Drebber. I guess I hated him more. He went back to Charpontier’s but didn’t stay long. In no time at all, he comes running back out onto the street with a young man at his heels, waving a stick and threat’ning to beat him to death. Well I pulled up my cab to the curb to save him. Funny, but in that moment I wasn’t thinking to kill him, only that I couldn’t let nobody else do it, or I’d lose my chance forever. Wasn’t ’til we were alone in my cab that I realized I finally had him. He hadn’t recognized me. He was jolly as you like; kept taking swigs out of that flask of his and telling me about some pretty girl he’d just been courtin’. He said he was tired out and ordered me to take him some place to sleep.”

“I drove him round to 3 Lauriston Gardens, what I knew to be vacant. He followed me in, friendly as you like, and complained of the darkness. I lit a candle, held it before my face and said, ‘You know me, Drebber! Who am I?’”